The show
The brain map
About 1,500 of the subgraph's neurons are drawn as their real skeletons, downloaded from Janelia and simplified to at most 40 vertices each: all receptor classes, every mushroom body output neuron and dopaminergic neuron that fits, a stratified sample of Kenyon cells and descending neurons, and the rest filled with whichever neurons were loudest in a real trace. The faint shells behind them are the neuropil surfaces.
Colour is data, never decoration. Each vertex takes its neuron's current state,
compressed with arcsinh and scaled by the neuron's own recent range:
- orange, positive rate
- blue, negative rate
- grey, at rest
Those three colours mean exactly that and are used nowhere else on the page. The market's green and red are deliberately different hues.
Four camera presets: whole brain, antennal lobe, mushroom body, descending neurons. When a new token arrives the camera dollies to the antennal lobe, because that is where the signal enters, then returns.
The fly on the laptop
The body is engineered, and the page says so under it. The fly is built in code (the NeuroMechFly mesh was tried and not worth its weight at stream size), and its five states are hand-authored animations, each triggered by a real event:
| state | trigger | what you see |
|---|---|---|
| idle | nothing for a while | breathing, the occasional foreleg rub |
| sniff | token_sniffed |
antennae flick, head turns |
| ape | the fly's verdict is APE | walks at the screen, rubs its forelegs |
| pump | a coin it sniffed touched 3× within the hour | wings flutter |
| rug | a coin it sniffed died within the hour | legs give out, it drops |
The laptop screen is GMGN's live chart of the coin on the stage, five-minute candles, with the verdict stamped on it, and BOUGHT or SOLD when the master wallet fills on that coin.
One coin at a time
The feed delivers up to 180 tokens a minute. The stream shows one: it arrives, the brain visibly works on it over four graph steps, the verdict lands, and it holds for a moment before the next. Everything else the fly smelled is in the database and the counters, but not on the stage, a wall of ready-made verdicts is not a show. A coin the master wallet holds is featured ahead of a louder one, so its second look is seen.
The four words
The model has three classes. The screen has four words, read against the ledger:
- APE / PASS, for a coin nobody holds: the fly's ape class, or not.
- HOLD / SELL, for a coin the master wallet is in: still smells good, or out.